Lesson Plans Wanted for Pre-University Students

LOS ALAMITOS, Calif., 1 April, 2011 – If you're a student or recent graduate and want to help foster awareness of computing, you can win US $1,000 by entering a contest to create a lesson plan that will captivate pre-university students' interest in the field.

The lesson-plan contest is part of IEEE TryComputing.org, a new online resource the IEEE Computer Society and IEEE Educational Activities Board are developing to offer global computing education resources for pre-university teachers, school counselors, parents, and students. The IEEE TryComputing site is intended to build upon the successes of its counterpart, TryEngineering.org, to raise awareness of and interest in computing and associated careers. TryComputing.org is funded by the IEEE New Initiatives Committee.

The lesson-planning competition is open to IEEE Student Members and IEEE Graduates of the Last Decade. Successful entrants will receive an award of US $1,000, a congratulatory letter, and their plan included on the TryComputing.org website.

The lesson plans should help students ages 8-18 understand the essential facts, concepts, principles, and theories relating to computer science and software applications. Among potential topics are networks, information organization, modeling and abstraction, and algorithmic thinking and programming.

Lessons should encourage creativity in the construction of solutions, possibly with more than one achievable design outcome. Most of all, they should be fun. The format for TryComputing.org lesson plans will be modeled after lessons currently featured on TryEngineering.org. Click here to learn more about the competition or download a flyer about the competition here.

To enter the contest, submit a one-page outline of the lesson plan to IEEE by 15 May. Finalists will be selected from the submissions, and invited to submit a full lesson plan by the end of August. Selected lesson plans will be posted on TryComputing.org when the site launches in 2012. Full details are available at IEEE's Education & Careers area.